bookends theme, vincent & willem jb

[lucius branwen / 10 — fox]

W   I   L   L   E   M

The door closes slowly behind him, and the noise from outside becomes smaller and smaller, until he looks back and there's just an inch of it left.

A beam of sound and sunlight dances on the wall,

and then nothing.

There are big sweeping paintings where the sun was, drawings of ships and landscapes that he thinks are supposed to be of Four. But the water never looks like that. The lines are very sharp and fine and crowded, and the hulls are too bright against the blue seas.

He thinks of their shore, with salt softened ships, bobbing on the water at dawn. He thinks of torrential downpours, broad strokes and spilling over the canvas.

He made watercolours of every season, and there's a muscle memory of the way he'd painted the waters of last August when he looks down to his hands.

Yesterday his palms were very hot underneath a pair of garden gloves and the dandelion fuzz was soft against his skin and his fingers followed the valleys and hills of a needle of thread on an old shirt. They were always holding and pressing and grasping and pulling, always entwined in some thought.

And now they're just there, balled into fists, resting on his lap.

Vincent is the second to visit.

First was Kaatje, who had burst through the door and came to him like a flame, hot and biting. She screamed at him for a while, and he had just sat there, looking somewhere past her at a stroke of paint in a golden frame on the wall opposite. And then she stopped, rushed towards him, pulled him into a hug, and he patted her a bit on the back as she continued to curse him out.

Vincent is more quiet. The door closes behind him with a soft click.

"Did I do okay?" He asks, and it comes out very soft. Because it was never supposed to be him, but now he was what they got, out on the podium, the drone cameras buzzing around him like glass bees. "How – how's mom?"

WE WERE ONLY DUST.

[gamemaker kelsier]

v i n c e n t .

"You're a part
of the morning
and everything
matters"

Willem's name is the flat of a blade across his skin, for a moment he forgets to breathe.

Willem, an artist, not even been to his trial yet but his name there, resounding over the crowd with a finality that no one dare question. No one wanted to seek the wrath of the Vanas family. One of the last families left that trained their children, eager for the title of this year's god-king.

Willem's name settles and Vince stands there, in the space that his cousin moves from and no one dares to fill it. Bad luck to be standing next to the reaped, bad luck to know him.

He's meant to be proud but all Vincent can think about is how he's going to be able to find Willem if he's gone to an arena. Inta was always easy enough to ponder over, she lives in a vagueness between life and death and Vince can believe she's alive.

If Willem goes to the Capitol, he might never return.

Alone, floating in a foreign sea, Willem will be lost.

And Vincent won't be able to go to him.

He stands there, a soft smile on his face as the crowd begins to mill around after the reaping. His hands ache suddenly, like every piece of him is cramping up. Trembling begins in his legs, the scent of bread wafts over them all and someone yells, "Tiernan, Sophiaaaa, where are youuuu?"

A hand wraps around his wrist, then a face looms in close, "Congrats on your cousin you lucky bastard!" says Bramble from school.

A clap on the back, hands on his shoulder, joy catching him  in eddies and turning him all around but Vincent just thinks he's going to be sick.

He doesn't want Willem to leave too.

He's running then, feet hitting pavement, curls flying in the wind as he pushes through the crowd, eyes on the white-washed building just ahead. Plaster crumbles off the side and there's a sign over the door in bronze that reads 'vivamus, moriendum est. '

Vincent passes through beneath it, and the sound of his footsteps turn to the echo of old hardwood. He slows down on approach, thoughts dripping through him slow, still too difficult to catch.

He's meant to be proud.

There's only horror there, buried deep in the skin. The lines of his forehead fold into each other like a tilled field, and Vincent thinks of wheat, golden and tall and dancing slowly in the wind.

There is no thought, only feeling.

Grief washes over him like the waves washing over the rocks at the shoreline. Grief for Inta, grief for Willem.

Their family crumbles slowly around him, eroding and there's nothing that Vincent can do.

He leans into the door to the room where Willem waits, his shoulder falls against heavy wood and the air shifts as he enters, the room so small and stuffy. And Willem, small, curly hair over dark, kind eyes.

"Did I do okay?" his cousin asks.
"Yes," Vincent says.
"How – how's mom?"
"I don't know," Vincent says because he's honest, "I think– I think probably not good."

Vincent stares at Willem for a moment. There was a time when the other boy was a lot shorter than him, even though their age gap was a mere few months. Sometime in the last year, Willem had reached his height. Vince had never noticed, it's hard to see the changes in someone when you spend almost every day with them.

"I'm not ready," Vincent utters, "I'm not ready for you to go."

[lucius branwen / 10 — fox]

W   I   L   L   E   M

"I don't know," Vincent says "I think– I think probably not good."

He nods, eyes falling down to his hands. He thinks of the night before, how her voice had fallen over him with both tenderness and anger, eyes like the moon's sea. She is his mother, and she is a name too.

"I'm not ready for you to go."

Willem looks up at Vincent, a boy whose cheeks are growing sharper with age, losing the softness of childhood, and he had always been taller than Will, but when he steps closer, he realizes not anymore.

His cousin looks almost like a stranger, more serious than he's seen him before. He was born and Vincent had been there, sixteen years of following his path, of a birth year they shared that came with desires and sorrows that only each other knew.

I'm not ready either,

He almost says it.

Gently, Will grasps Vincent's hand and tries to smile. His eyes are burning, but he knows not to cry.

"I have to." It's all he says, because he does.

He is being mourned. This is what this is.

He watches his family say goodbye to him, one by one in their own homes of grief. Kaatje is destructive. Vincent is solemn. He saw it already with Inta.

And it was very lonely, to be in his own home, his mother simmering with worry, his sister withdrawn in an organ of bitterness. And his own solitude too, the way he'd set the table for Inta at every meal, so that when she returned, she would know that they had not forgotten her.

Another month after the funeral, his father would quietly remove her plate from the table.

He feels both relief and an ache in his bones.

Vincent does not think he will come back, but it's alright because maybe he doesn't think so either.

He is somewhere between boy and man, and there is nowhere left for him to go. He thinks of the tree that had sprouted in between the buildings of their home, how it grew to be nearly his height, this pitiful thing, spilling out for the sky and wind, the murmurs of life.

It could not grow there. It would die.

And he could not move it either, roots already entwined around stone and metal, melded into one.

"Don't miss me too much. Take care of yourself, okay? Promise?" He swallows the soreness of saying goodbye, opens his mouth to say something comforting, but there is nothing left.

"I have a present for Sinterklaas." The words erupt from him instead. And an invisible, lingering thing inside him shakes, his words dipping into the shore of tears, but he takes in a breath and holds it in. "If I don’t come back –" There's a sharp breath, the feeling of finding specks of blood and baby blue eggshells in the grass. He was very young when he found the bodies of a dead nest, crying when he buried it in their garden. He remembers it. He always remembers it.

"It's in the left drawer in my desk. It's yours."

WE WERE ONLY DUST.